According to the UNHCR, refugees are those who have been forced to leave their country due to violence, war, or persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or particular social group. Furthermore, there are currently 25.9 million refugees in the world, indicating the dramatic growth in refugees over the past decade. This led us to question what the refugee resettlement trend has been for the past decade, and delve deeper than just the changes in the numbers of refugees.
The United States is one of the nations that have one of the largest resettlement of refugees. However, in 2017, the US resettled the fewest number of refugees compared to the rest of the world.We are interested in answering the following questions to gain a better understanding of the refugee resettlements in the United States:
We first collected data from RPC (Refugee Processing Center), that provides refugee arrival information by state and nationality, by destination and nationality, by nationality and religion, and by demographic profile.
We can select the time frame, nationality. Since the RPC website does not allow for faceting by year, we had to download the files year by year, and clean the data into the format we want for data analysis.
clean_arrival to clean the Excel files for all refugee resettlements for each state.clean_demographics to clean the Excel files for demographic information for refugees from specific countries (namely Bhutan, Burma, DRC, Iraq, and Somalia).combine_files, to combine each year’s Excel file into one.After cleaning the data, we have six ‘.csv’ files that can be found here.
all_arrivals.csv: The total number of refugee resettlements to each of the 50 states in the US from 2009-2018. All raw files to make this file can be found here.| State | Cases | Inds | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| California | 5524 | 11512 | 2009 |
| Texas | 3638 | 8826 | 2009 |
| New York | 2013 | 5003 | 2009 |
| Arizona | 1952 | 4543 | 2009 |
| Florida | 1834 | 4196 | 2009 |
| Michigan | 1602 | 3460 | 2009 |
age_group.csv:| Age.Group | Male | Female | Total | country | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 14 | 1559 | 1627 | 3186 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Age 14 to 20 | 1258 | 1310 | 2568 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Age 21 to 30 | 1823 | 1927 | 3750 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Age 31 to 40 | 1110 | 1124 | 2234 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Age 41 to 50 | 726 | 737 | 1463 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Age 51 to 64 | 583 | 626 | 1209 | Bhutan | 2009 |
education.csv:| Education | Male | Female | Total | country | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bio Data not Complete | 2657 | 1846 | 4503 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Graduate School | 21 | 144 | 165 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Intermediate | 509 | 496 | 1005 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Kindergarten | 123 | 127 | 250 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| NONE | 100 | 42 | 142 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Pre-University | 1 | 1 | 2 | Bhutan | 2009 |
ethnicity.csv:| Ethnicity | Male | Female | Total | country | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lhotsampa | 7373 | 7677 | 15050 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Other | 12 | 15 | 27 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Lhotsampa | 5842 | 5881 | 11723 | Bhutan | 2010 |
| Other | 3 | 3 | 6 | Bhutan | 2010 |
| Lhotsampa | 7314 | 7410 | 14724 | Bhutan | 2011 |
| Other | 4 | 7 | 11 | Bhutan | 2011 |
native_language.csv:| Native.Language | Male | Female | Total | country | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bio Data not Complete | 3 | 4 | 7 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Dzongka | 0 | 1 | 1 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| English | 2 | 1 | 3 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Hindi | 1 | 0 | 1 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Marathi | 1 | 0 | 1 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Napoletano-Calabrese | 0 | 1 | 1 | Bhutan | 2009 |
religion.csv:| Religion | Male | Female | Total | country | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buddhist | 748 | 853 | 1601 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Christian | 534 | 518 | 1052 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Hindu | 5798 | 5993 | 11791 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Kirat | 305 | 328 | 633 | Bhutan | 2009 |
| Buddhist | 925 | 910 | 1835 | Bhutan | 2010 |
| Christian | 468 | 453 | 921 | Bhutan | 2010 |
The datasets from RPC (Refugee Processing Center) did not contain any missing values. However, we also noticed that our data contained a single row called “Unknown State”. Since this would not be plotted in our maps, we decided that it would be better to remove the data. Additionally, when we converted the State column to factors, there were 56. The extra 6 states are:
We removed these rows since we are just curious about the fifty states.
We take a closer look at the top 5 countries that have refugees resettled in the USA (https://data.newamericaneconomy.org/en/refugee-resettlement-us/).
The top 5 religions in the world are: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism (https://thecountriesof.com/top-5-largest-religions-in-the-world/). In Iraq, they separate the Muslim population into three categories: Muslim, Muslim Shiite, and Muslim Suni. For the purposes of this analysis, we will combine them as one.
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